Later, when the removers sat on the pavement warming themselves at a brazier and drinking, while Mr rose and fell in a delirium of terror and remorse, she tasted bubbles of laughter in the back of her throat again. But when cars began to coast up with their headlights off, and figures were gathering themselves into groups, their voices coming and going, their eyes turning in, the lenses of their glasses flashing secret messages through the grainy air, her throat dried up.
People are beginning to stare, she thought, and waited grimly for morning.
The puckered eaves of the Malgases’ house lent an inquisitive expression to its normally bored face. This slight transformation irked Nieuwenhuizen, who was preparing to retire and looking forward to an uneventful sleep.
He thought he saw Mrs backing away from the lounge window looking over her shoulder, but it seemed to him that she was no more than a mote in a blind eye. He saw Mr too, closer to home, and found him for the moment incomprehensible, like a joke without a punch line.
Under the malignant influence of these thoughts Nieuwenhuizen concluded with a world-weary sonority that got on his own nerves: “We are condemned to renounce and repeat, the head and the tail, the one barking and the other wagging, with the body of the same old dog between them.”And fell fast asleep.
Mr Malgas lay like a victim of the ongoing violence in a shallow grave. Words trickled through him and seeped away into the sand. The night held a hand on the nape of his neck, and whenever he was buoyed up by a familiar intonation or an inspiring turn of phrase, that hand pressed him down again.
Conspiracy. Consanguinity. Contrariety. Confundity. Conundrumbrage.
He thought he felt boots treading the small of his back and the tops of his thighs, embossing him with algebra and etymology. Footsteps thundered in his chest cavity. Later, fingers of light brushed over him and he rose to the surface and knocked against the earth’s meniscus. As he floated there a voice began to call him insistently, Malgas, Malgas, caught its sibilant hooks in the fabric of his skin, and reeled him, thrashing, upwards. His head, which was bloated with stuffy air and numbed by the echoes of his name, cracked through the crust. He looked at the foreign landscape under his nose.
Daybreak. His head rolled over. A cruet-stand came into view — salt and pepper tom-toms and a mustard-pot in the shape of a mud hut. Behind the hut the legs of a lectern rose like three slender tree trunks; and behind the trees, dwarfing them, the mirrored face of a wardrobe as tall as a skyscraper. Behind the tower block, against the grey sky, far-away mountains assumed the shape of his house. In that instant of recognition, his whole body solidified in a rush of blood and he crashed into the air.
He rolled over onto his back. Flopping his head from side to side, he took in the wreckage: furniture, clothing, bric-à-brac, kitchen-ware, toiletries. What was that sound? Water running. A broken pipe. . no, never. “I imagined it all,” he told himself firmly. “None of it was real. Except for this jumble of junk and cheap packaging. I wonder what became of the removers? Not to mention Otto.”
Mr Malgas sat up, and the people gathered in the street on the edge of the plot burbled their approval. He wiped the sleep out of his eyes and focused on them. They were making a noise, babbling like water over stones, empty shells clacking together in the backwash.
When they felt the light touch of his attention upon them, the members of the crowd asserted their individual personalities and shapes by passing comments and thrusting out their chests to show the colourful labels and pithy slogans on their clothing, but they spoilt the effect by all speaking at the same time and pressing together in a mass, shoulder to shoulder and belly to back.
Malgas squinted. No doubt about it. There were hundreds of them, people, held back by festoons of candy-striped ribbon and paperchains of policemen. Bright lights on tall tripods looked over their shoulders, and beyond them other lights winked on the roofs of cars and trucks, and glinted on scaffolds and catwalks.
Mr Malgas stared at the people. The people fell silent, in dribs and drabs, and stared back.
There were faces he knew, scattered among the popping flash bulbs, partly obscured by cameras. Mrs Dworkin, a couple of waitresses, one of the grillers, and Van As, the storeman. Bob and Alison Parker, also of the Helpmekaar — they had the stationery shop next to the escalators. Dinnerstein. The Greek from the corner café. Some relatives of Mrs from the coast. Venter, her gluttonous second cousin. There were friends and neighbours — Long time no see! — some stalwarts of the Civil Defence League, the Treasurer of the Ratepayers’ Association, what was his name?. . De Lange. There were customers and clients, Benny Buys in his Mr Hardware T-shirt, children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and sales representatives. The postman. The removers, surrounded by photographers (news and fashion). Doctors and nurses, lawyers, electrical engineers, interior decorators, miners, market gardeners, cashiers, taxi-drivers and supermarket packers (to name just a few). There were dozens of nodding acquaintances, they were smiling and nodding their heads, but their names escaped him. There were countless others, who were bound to be strangers. There were thousands lost to sight and millions — no, billions entirely absent! And beyond them all, the vast and silent majority of the dead and the yet to be conceived.
For some reason this speculative train of thought reassured Mr Malgas and, for reasons that were easier to grasp, reminded him of Nieuwenhuizen. He got to his feet. The crowd cheered his effort generously. He was aching from head to toe, and he winced and grumbled to himself as he picked his way through the debris to the camp. The cameras captured the tiniest twinge and magnified it; the microphones mopped up the softest groan and amplified it.
The tent was still standing, and Nieuwenhuizen was inside it sleeping like a log. His untroubled breathing rippled the canvas walls and enlivened the guy-ropes. Mr Malgas thought he would wake him with a cup of tea. He found the gas-bottle gizmo and the bottle itself among the clutter at the foot of the tree; he found the pot jammed into the hedge; but he couldn’t find water. The drum was empty. While he was checking the pots and jars for water, the zip grated open and Nieuwenhuizen stuck out his head.
The people responded with a breath-taking display of shimmering palms and flashing bulbs.
Nieuwenhuizen took in the situation at a glance. “Who are these people, Malgas?”
“It’s the wider society.”
“You don’t say.”
Nieuwenhuizen squirmed through the flap and clattered to his feet. The crowd cheered and surged against the barriers. Nieuwenhuizen dug up a pair of field-glasses and surveyed the crowd.
“Ridiculous,” Mr Malgas thought. “He can call them field-glasses if he likes. But I say it’s two brown beer bottles tied together with wire.”
“Hm, you’re right,” Nieuwenhuizen said. “It is them. The people. Office-bearers and ordinary ones. A good smear of thrill-seekers too, I should say. Motor cars. Must belong to them. Buses, yes, mini- and tour-. What’s this? Television aerials, roof-tops, steeples. It’s the outside world all right. I might have known they’d turn up eventually, and just in time to be too late.”
“I could find out what they want.”
“Thanks, but that won’t be necessary. I’ll just pack a few things, and then we can have one for the road and a little chat.”